Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 14, 2001

2001-01-14 04:00:00 PDT Pristina, Yugoslavia -- Bernard Kouchner, the U.N. official in charge in Kosovo, departed Kosovo yesterday and urged the world to respond quickly to the local desire for greater self-government.

Elections for an assembly should be held throughout the province as soon as possible, ideally by June but certainly by September, Kouchner said in an interview.

He urged his successor, the former Danish defense minister, Hans Haekkerup, who arrives tomorrow, not to waste time with bureaucratic fine-tuning.

"The main thing is a general election," Kouchner said. "I tell him not to lose your time in setting up a better administration -- help them here to set one up. Don't play the game of an eternal mandate" from the United Nations to rule Kosovo for those who live in the province.

Kouchner said he was more than a little sad to leave one of the biggest challenges of his life. He has been the virtual czar of Kosovo since he arrived in July 1999, barely a month after NATO troops entered the blasted Serbian province. As the leader of the U.N. administration that runs Kosovo, Kouchner -- a doctor who was co-founder of Doctors Without Borders -- brought an emotional urgency and boldness to the bewildering problems of a society traumatized by war and revenge.

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For all his administrative shortcomings -- and Kouchner never pretended to be a model bureaucrat -- he quickly understood that the United Nations must try to share responsibility with the local population or risk the backlash inevitable to any colonial rule.

He said his biggest failure -- in a view shared by international groups, the soldiers in Kosovo and by the Kosovo Albanians themselves -- "is our inability to stop the violence, to offer enough protection to all the members of the community, the Serbs and the other minorities."

While the numbers of international police are finally approaching the original goal and hundreds of newly trained local police officers are now walking the beat, a Serb in Kosovo is eight times more likely than an Albanian to be the victim of ethnic violence, even though the vast majority of the remaining 100,000 or so Serbs in the province are living in protected ethnic enclaves.

The final status of Kosovo will be resolved down the road, Kouchner said, not soon. But the United Nations has promised the people substantial autonomy and self-government, "and self-government without the vote I don't understand."

In a farewell speech, broadcast on local television and repeated to local leaders, Kouchner urged on them a final message, "simple and grave: Stop the killings, my dear friends, stop the violence."

The Kosovo Albanians have already damaged their reputation in the eyes of the world and undercut international sympathy by the culture of impunity and tolerance for reverse ethnic cleansing and violence, Kouchner said.

He listed joint achievements like housing reconstruction and power-sharing, then said, "If the violence continues -- against minorities, against honest administrators, against intellectuals and elected leaders -- then all the wonderful achievements I have just listed will have been for nothing."